Skye is dead.
How she perished is a mystery. All she knows is that she is trapped in After, a makeshift city of souls surrounded by infinite darkness and terrifying monsters that tear ghosts apart.
But while all other ghosts accept the eternity of...
"All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream."
- Edgar Allan Poe
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I wanted to scream.
But no matter how much I strained my lungs, only a strangled keen escaped my throat. No matter how fast I tried to run, it was as if some thick miasma slowed my movements—like I was stuck in a dream. Or...like I was trapped in a nightmare.
Because monsters were hunting me.
I couldn't see them, for either I had gone blind, or the world had been plunged into heavy, pulsating darkness, but I could hear them hissing and shuffling behind me on long, spindly, and numerous legs. I could feel them when they reached with mangled hands and clutched at my clothes and hair as I ran.
"Help me!" I wailed, grasping at more of that darkness ahead of me. My voice didn't carry far. The echoes of my pleas lingered in the air like flies in a web, barely a breath away from my face. My foot caught on something I couldn't see. With a gasp, I fell into what felt like sand.
I expected my breath to quicken when hissing surrounded me and clawed feet of unseen creatures kicked up the sand. I expected my heart to race. I expected my blood to turn to ice.
But none of those things happened. I felt nothing but a sick emptiness inside me.
Something else's breath beat down on my face. I swore I heard the slow, wet sound of toothy jaws parting.
And then there came a light.
A red beam cut through the dark, illuminating everything in my immediate vicinity.
I wished it hadn't.
I clapped my hands over my mouth to stifle the urge to spill my guts onto the ground at what I saw. The humanoid face before me drew back its lips in a squeal of pain. It snapped milky white eyes shut against the light that scorched its black flesh. The monster recoiled from me and returned to the darkness with its many pairs of spider-like limbs. The other creatures lingered with muscles tensed beneath sagging skin, braced to pounce.
Before they could, a glowing blade sliced through their limbs. Fluid like ink sprayed from severed appendages and splashed over me.
The maimed creatures screamed and fled from the red light's reach. When the shrieking silenced and the severed arms on the ground stopped twitching, a masked figure shrouded in a billowing, ratty cloak moved to stand beside me. Still wielding the flashlight that kept the monsters at bay, the person brushed her cloak aside and sheathed her blood-stained katana. At least, I thought it was a katana, but its blade flared red hot like nothing I'd ever seen before. The wind kicked up flecks of black sand, making them fly like swarming gnats in the beam of light the cloaked girl now pointed at me.
"Are you going to keep lying there until the shadows come back, or are you going to come with me?" she said with a British lilt. "This torch won't keep them away for long."
